


Friends With Strange Cats

by RileyC



Category: Batman Beyond
Genre: Cemetery, F/M, Goodbyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 07:07:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/936862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RileyC/pseuds/RileyC
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time to say goodbye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Friends With Strange Cats

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Comic Drabbles at LiveJournal challenge #045 - A Death in the Family.

_She’d never liked the cold,_ he remembers as January snow drifts down over the grave. Every year, as the first leaves began to fall, she would try to persuade him to forsake the gloom of Gotham for warm, tropical climes. Once or twice he’d given in.

 

He thinks of the last time he’d swept her away to lounge on a sun-drenched beach. He remembers sultry nights and lazy days and the time he looked up as a musical jingle drifted through the air and he saw her walking along the beach toward him—wearing nothing but a spark of mischief in her eyes and a bracelet of bells around her ankle.

 

_“Didn’t you say once that you’d like to put a bell on me?”_

_“Not exactly what I had in mind,” _he’d said, no further protests raised as she’d straddled him and leaned in to claim his mouth…

 

He shakes himself, against the memory, against the cold, and lays a red rose upon her grave.

 

How many graves, how many roses… The thought comes unbidden and he swiftly banishes it even as his gaze drifts around the cemetery and tries not to linger on too many names.

 

Terry’s waiting for him. He should go; his ghosts will always be there. Funny, though, how what used to haunt him is almost a comfort now.

 

***

Terry leans against the car, shoulders hunched against the cold as he watches the Old Man. He’s been out here before. Bruce isn’t much on birthdays but he remembers the exact moment when someone he loved had died. Terry tries not to dwell on that a lot.

 

The temperature’s dropping, though, and he thinks it’s time to go. He hugs his overcoat around him as he heads over to the grave. “Bruce?” He looks at the name on marble headstone— **Selina Kyle—** and the epitaph below: _You will always be lucky if you make friends with a strange cat._ He suspects that means something he’ll never entirely understand. Bruce spoke of her once, after Melanie Walker’d kicked him in the gut, but he knows that barely scratched the surface of who this woman was, and what she was to Bruce. “You ready to go?”

 

Bruce looks at him and nods, inscrutable as usual. “Let’s go,” he says and starts back to the car, steps careful and his cane gripped tight.

 

There’s a cat warming its butt on the hood of the car. Black and sleek, tail daintily wrapped around its paws, it watches them and looks at Bruce. Once, twice, its emerald eyes drift shut as it looks at him. Then, and Terry would swear he hears the _sprong_ at it leaps, the cat jumps down and saunters off with a flick of its tail.

 

Bruce watches after it for a long time and smiles.


End file.
